Monthly Archives: December 2017

Any normal week, I’d be prepping my (late) WIPpet Wednesday post. This being the week between Christmas and New Years and all the chaos contained within… well, it’s not a normal week.

There’s not going to be a post beyond this little note. Life is good, but very cold here in the wilds of Upstate NY. The holiday “feel” has already faded some, it seems to me, though it could be the fact I’ve been spending most of my last few days reading murder mysteries (the delightful Gaslight series by Victoria Thompson and the newish Molly Murphy books by Rhys Bowen) and waiting for your son to finish his days at soccer camp. The family visits are an”in progress” affair, but we’ve made a few already.

In all, the Holidays have been what they should be… a time of change and tradition merged into one.

I had a lot of fun last week with Stream of Consciousness Saturday, and though I’m running a bit late this week (holidays! very busy for the holidays, but at last in a somewhat good way), I still wanted to post something, as I won’t be doing a WeWriWa post (I’ve decided to only do those every two weeks, for sanity’s sake) tonight.

The SoCS bloghop is to post something (anything really, picture, meme, story, etc.) on a prompt that Linda G. Hill sets out for people Friday evening, link it back to her website, along with a link to the rules, and to visit other participants. The full story, plus rules can be found here at Linda’s blog.

Today’s prompt is to use Yule, you’ll or Yul somehow as the first word in a piece, and to not plan it very far ahead…

Yul is a hard name to come up with for a character. I wanted to write something relating to my stories, but today… nothing. They don’t know anyone named Yul. They don’t celebrate “The Yule”, not the way we do. They do have a Midwinter-like festival, which they call the Wintersong, when they sing great songs to waken the lesser gods and goddesses, joining their voices so-to-speak with that of their Great Mother, the Singer of All Songs, so that the work needed to return light and fertility to the land can be done.

Some of the “lesser deities” can be pretty lazy folks. Though… there are some, like Kéline, the Death’s Head as she’s also known, tends to relish the slower, darker seasons of the year. Some say she prefers these days because man has kept her busy enough in the summer and fall months with his wars and sacrifices. In the Spring, she seems to step back and the world blooms anew, animals bear young… things fill with hope.

It’s not a new concept. It is the mythology as my characters tell me, a slightly merged version as there are distinct sects.

But they don’t follow the Yuletide in the Christian sense. I guess one could say they do technically, if Yule is used like the jól of Norse mythology, related more to Odin, the Yule Father, relating more to feasting…

The name Yul though? Well, except for Yul Brynner (one of my favorite childhood actors), I can’t think of anyone named that. A quick Google search finds it to be known as:

Two things today… a WIPpet and at the end of this post, a brief ROW80 End of Round update.

Today’s WIPpet follows on the heels of the piece I posted two weeks ago from my The Odds fanfic. The first line today is the last line from last week. Andy and Kieri are getting a new perspective on each other.

This snippet is a bit longer than most of the ones I post. I hope you’ll bear with me as it closes at a good spot (imho, of course). There are ten (mostly small) paragraphs. There’s one 2 in the 12 for December; divide the day (20) by that 2 and you have ten…

“Did you cry when I was shot?”

His lover stopped, still turned away. Though Kieri didn’t answer for several breaths, thankfully he finally did before Andy felt inspired to head over and hound him. “Of course.”

Kieri still didn’t turn to face him, but Andy didn’t feel like a little kid chasing an idol now as he walked around look at him. The other man’s lips pursed in something close to a snarl. He practically spat as he continued. “I was damned banshee for weeks after.” Now Kieri looked at him. It was a look that made Andy’s blood freeze. “As lost as the day I’d lost Pem, maybe more… I don’t know. I didn’t feel like killing myself—I didn’t feel, if you have to know. I stopped feeling. Stopped caring. None of it seemed to matter. I stayed in our room until Vern had the rest of the guys drag us out of there so he could bury you, the second week after it had happened.”

Andy grimaced. “Two weeks? Not that I don’t—ugh, that’s just wrong.”

“Yeah, maybe. But I didn’t care. It was my fault you’d died, and I..I just wanted you back, maybe I thought I could trade places with you. I don’t know.”

He nodded, though like the story of the Andar’s wife, he really didn’t understand. To do such a thing and yet not be able to share his feelings… Even now the man was evading him. Though maybe the barriers were down enough. “Why? I don’t see how it would have helped.”

As close as they’d been, sex, passion, great talks, all the closeness and ideas they’d shared, he’d never seen Kieri shed a tear or show tenderness in any way for him.

Now he was seeing it; it shook him. It had taken his death to do this. Andy had always hoped to crack Kieri’s shell with who he was, not with what they’d suffered. He couldn’t love a rock.

Still, the words came, unwanted now. “That didn’t matter though. I loved you—you’d been everything to me, and I’d been too stupid to understand that until it was too late.”

Andy wasn’t sure what to say. It nothing like he’d hoped, and he needed to understand why. He looked at the floor, tracing the lines of the pattern in the tiles with his gaze. “We should get going.”

Thank the god, goddess, whatever… Thank Whatever that the other man just agreed.

Hope you enjoyed that piece. If you’d like more head over to our special WIPpet linky and visit our other awesome members. Thank you, Emily Wrayburn, for being such a gracious host.

A little ROw80 update

Today, for those of you who participate in the A Round of Words in 80 Days writing challenge, is the last day of Round 4. It’s the last day of the year in ROW80 terms as well.

I’d like to say I ended the year on a high note. True, I don’t feel this was my most productive year as a writer—instead it became a year for different discoveries and developing new skills. The biggest would be learning how to understand the patterns both in my writing but also that in others’ writings. And to recognize where some of my limits actually lie and devising strategies to work around them instead of trying to press through difficulties, failing and then bashing myself against those walls in frustration.

I’ve also learned how to better handle time constraints, and how to make the best of inspirational sparks when they arrive. It’s been a year of reading, as I’ve rediscovered a love for books that had faded for a time after some particularly wall-worthy texts had landed in my hands.